`GO' WHERE TEEN PIX FEAR TO TREAD.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Critic

Clever in a Tarantino-ish way and hysterical in a manner Kenneth Starr might relate to, ``Go'' tries really hard to look hip. It's got young people behaving badly, three stories that intersect and fall back on one another from different perspectives, sudden bursts of crazy violence and gender-bending sex gags. But the real agenda here is fundamentally square.

The filmmakers, novice screenwriter John August and director Doug Liman, whose previous feature was the differently retro nightlife comedy ``Swingers,'' appear to be thoroughly appalled by the prospect of young people doing anything the least bit illicit and feel the wayward youths must be punished for their transgressions.

The comeuppance that spills out onto the screen includes some very funny, even existentially absurd situations, which indicates that we're hardly in the hands of humorless Puritans here. Still, you come out of this movie wondering why any sensible kid would ever wish to experiment with drugs, attend a rave or visit Las Vegas, so cheap are the thrills and harrowing the consequences of those acts. It's a lecture with laughs, the moral of which is that not thinking before you, well, go off and do something always gets you into trouble.

The first to learn this is underpaid L.A. supermarket clerk Ronna (Sarah Polley, the fine Canadian actress from ``The Sweet Hereafter''). She's headstrong and tough and apparently living on her own, the latter none too successfully: Ronna's about to be evicted - on Christmas Eve - unless she can drum up some rent.

A holiday miracle of sorts arrives in the form of English co-worker Simon (Desmond Askew), who's about to leave for Vegas with some buddies but has a drug deal pending. If Ronna runs some Ecstasy from Simon's connection, Todd (Timothy Olyphant, good at mixing menace with stoner charm), to some guys at a party, she can keep enough of the profits to pay her landlord.

Naturally, the deal does not go down as easily as it should. Ronna's partners in crime, virginal checkout girl Claire (``Dawson's Creek's'' Katie Holmes) and stock boy Mannie (Nathan Bexton), end up sort of kidnapped and hallucinating under a pile of trash, respectively. As for Ronna, her fate is just awful ...

But before we have time to absorb that, we're in Nevada with Simon and his friends, where our hero enjoys multiple sex partners, steals a car, sets a hotel on fire and breaks some evidently important rules at a lap-dancing club.

The third chapter takes us back to L.A. a few hours earlier (or is it later that same night? With all the hard partying, you kind of lose track). We're in the early stages of the Ronna story, but this time from the viewpoints of the two guys she was scoring dope for. They're Adam (``Party of Five's'' Scott Wolf) and Zack (``Jerry Maguire's'' Jay Mohr), and they're stars of the kind of syndicated cop show local stations air late weekend nights against reruns of ``Walker, Texas Ranger.''

Anyway, Adam and Zack have apparently been busted and, to keep the scandal quiet, are working in entrapment cahoots with a real, weird cop, Burke (William Fichtner, in arguably the film's funniest performance). Burke keeps dropping outrageously homoerotic hints to the actors and insists that they spend Christmas Eve dinner at his house, where he and wife Irene (``Ally McBeal's'' Jane Krakowski) have a startling proposition cooked up.

The refreshing things about ``Go'' are its kinetic energy, its observational humor and its often realistic portrayals of young people as tougher, more reckless and just plain crazier than the current run of high school comedies dare to acknowledge. Liman and company get both the silliness and the danger of the teen drug/rave scene pretty right, and the director balances laughs with palpable paranoia quite effectively.

Perhaps these are qualities only audiences older than the film's target crowd can appreciate. The same is probably true of ``Go's'' underlying, finger-wagging attitude.

THE FACTS

The film: ``Go'' (R; drug use, violence, language, sex, nudity).

The stars: Sarah Polley, Desmond Askew, Katie Holmes, Scott Wolf, Jay Mohr, Timothy Olyphant, Taye Diggs, William Fichtner.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Doug Liman. Written by John August. Produced by Paul Rosenberg, Mickey Liddell and Matt Freeman. Released by Columbia Pictures.

Running time: One hour, 40 minutes.

Playing: Citywide.

Our rating: Three stars.

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Photo

Photo: In ``Go,'' two supermarket workers (Katie Holmes, left, and Sarah Polley) take part in a drug deal.